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Scaling the Shard

One night last November, two hooded young men — Bradley L. Garrett and Marc Explo — slipped through security surveillance to reach the top of the Shard. Contrary to what one might think, they were not vandals. Bradley L. Garrett, a PhD in cultural geography and researcher at the University of London, retraces his climb up Europe's tallest skyscraper and reflects on the importance of urban exploration.

London is a city undergoing constant mutation.
Historical archives are filled with photographs
dating from as recent as the 1960s portraying areas
of the city that are almost unrecognisable today.

The sprawl continues to stretch from different
urban nodes, East, West, South and North, melding
into one another, subsuming suburbs, urbanising
not only the landscape but also the citizenry.

However, the city has grown up and down as
much as out. Especially in the past few decades,
with the construction of One Canada Square, the
Barbican towers, the Balfron and Trellick towers,
122 Leadenhall Street, Swiss Re Tower, Heron Tower,
Centre Point, Strata, 20 Fenchurch Street and, of
course, the Shard. These vertical megaliths are
impossible to escape, they inevitably become part of
the public consciousness and are playfully renamed:
Thatcher's Dick, the Gherkin, the Lipstick (or Blow
Dryer), the Tower of Terror, the Cheese Grater,
the Walkie Talkie. In time, few people remember
what the "official" name for these places was;
they are consumed and regurgitated by playful
imaginations. This is one of the ways we make
corporate, private and largely inaccessible spaces
ours. At the same time, under our feet, ostensibly
more public construction projects are taking place as
new urban networks like Crossrail are sunk deeper
and deeper beneath existing sewers, gas and fibreoptic
conduits, telephone lines and transportation
corridors. Every once in a while, a cross-section
diagram of subterranean London is proffered and
people marvel at the complexity, wishing they
could see it for themselves. We do.

Top: London’s skyline
photographed by Garrett
from the top of the Shard.
Born and bred in California,
he now explores London with
the knowledge of his formal
education. After studying
history and anthropology
at the University of
California, and marine
archaeology at the
James Cook University
of Townsville, Australia,
he recently received
a research doctorate
in cultural geography
from Royal Holloway,
University of London. Above: Garrett looking across
the South Bank of the
Thames from NEO Bankside,
a residential complex designed
by Rogers Stirk Harbour +
Partners near the Tate Modern

While visiting these places is, for most people,
vicariously achieved through rare TV documentaries
with "exclusive access", this is not the case for
my group of friends. Over the last few years, we
have descended into and scaled each of these new
construction projects in the dead of night. In the
heart of the city, we melded into the shadows and
evaded site security to reach the pinnacle of each
skyscraper, one after another, until eventually,
last year, we became the first to scale the largest
building in the European Union: the Shard.

It was
surprising to us that after all our accomplishments
as explorers — revealing the control rooms of
Battersea Power Station, abandoned Tube stations,
the London Mail Rail and extensive deep shelters
around the city — this would be the exploration
the sparked the most interest. However, extremes
always encourage sensationalist media titillation:
the tallest, the deepest, the longest whatever. The
press called the Shard the "urban Everest" and
made every attempt to link the story to the 2012
Olympics through "security" and "urban sporting"
angles. The response from Shard's security services
was a relatively bored acknowledgment that
security "had been tightened". The developers, not
to mention the architect Renzo Piano, probably
enjoyed the free publicity and got a chuckle out of
the story. The reaction that mattered most to me,
however, was not from the media or the developer,
but from other Londoners.

Garrett on Aldgate East
Crane, above a building under
construction but seemingly
abandoned

Of all the public comments the story received, two
really stuck with me. The first was from a banker
who wrote saying, "Mate, I have worked at London
Bridge for years and watched that building getting
built from day one. I looked up at it all the time and
not once did I try to imagine what it might look
like from the top down. Now every morning I look
up and my palms sweat and it makes me smile.
Cheers for that!" The second comment was from a
mother of four who told me, "I came across your site
after reading on the BBC News site about the Shard
urbex… I loved the story and I am glad that there are
guys like you out there in the world." These were of
course among other comments calling us twats and
vandals. It seems people either love or hate what we
do, though most of the feedback we received was
overwhelmingly encouraging.

The media attention over the Shard story was hard
on us as a group. Many explorers are content for
our practice to remain on the margins, a selfish,
egotistical naval-gazing adrenaline squeeze. I
am not. The experiences we have in the city, and
the discoveries we make, deserve to be shared
precisely because of comments like these. People are
overworked, overtired, bored and apathetic. They
are frustrated with the government, corporations,
banks and their jobs. Our explorations pull them out
of that banal capitalist horizontality (even for a few
moments) and elevate them into a vertical urban
realm where the impossible is made possible, both
above and below ground. We stroll though buried
rivers, float in the clouds, run tracks between trains
and find places lost to time.

By sneaking in and taking photos to share with
fellow urbanites, we begin publicising private space,
democratising oligarchic architecture, turning
abstract corporate spaces into more human, playful
places, and making public infrastructure visible
to the public who pay to maintain it with their tax
money

Garrett on top of King’s
Reach, a 111-metre tower
in the London borough of
Southwark. Designed by
Richard Seifert, it was
completed in 1972

You can read about the historical importance of
the sewers or the engineering magnificence of a
skyscraper, but nothing compares to the firsthand
experience of being there, folding yourself into the
stories of those places. Not everyone is interested
in doing what we do (nor do we want them to be!),
but in knowing that it can and has been done, we
collectively begin to rewrite our notions of what
is still possible, in an age of seemingly constant
surveillance. We begin to rework our boundaries of
the known city, while challenging people to think
about why they're told they can't be in certain places.
The more you question the social conditioning that
keeps us boxed in, the more ridiculous it seems.

The conceptual barrier to places in our cities is
brought about by a process of engineered exclusion.
While horizontal sprawl and change is visible,
visitable and affects us (examples include sitting
in increased traffic or putting up with construction
due to transportation line extensions), we often
feel out of touch with vertical sprawl because those
spaces (especially tall buildings) are built for the
elite, the 1%, the bankers, bosses and businessmen
(yes I said men). In the case of the Shard,
apartments on floors 53 to 65 will cost 3 to 5 million
pounds each. While concessions are sometimes
made, such as the inclusion of public viewing
platforms on the Shard, they will presumably, like
the Eye, be for those who are able to pay exorbitant
entrance fees. Those platforms will also have a
separate entrance to ensure visitors don't access
the rest of the building. It's clear that these vertical
spaces, though inescapably part of the urban
constitution, are not built for us.

Yaz and
Garrett inside the sewerage
system underneath Stockwell
Tube Station

By sneaking in and taking photos to share with
fellow urbanites, we begin publicising private space,
democratising oligarchic architecture, turning
abstract corporate spaces into more human, playful
places, and making public infrastructure visible
to the public who pay to maintain it with their tax
money. We do it out of love: love for architecture,
love for the unfolding of history and love for the
experience of being front and centre to witness
London's unstoppable process of mutation. We are
cultivating the creative city that money can't buy.

Urban exploration may seem like something new
due to the increased media coverage recently — let
me assure you it is not. The desire to explore the
environment in which we live is hard-wired into
us as curious, passionate, inquisitive beings — it
always has been. Whether we are scaling snowy
peaks, diving to new depths in the sea, excavating
prehistoric house pits or wiggling through vent
shafts into metro tunnels, the desire to explore is
part of us. Wherever doors are closed, we will find
a way through, wherever history is buried, we will
uncover it, wherever architecture is exclusionary,
we will liberate it. Bradley L. Garrett (@Goblinmerchant) is a researcher, explorer and photographer

“Urban explorer” Winch
inside a River Tyburn
sewer. Members of Garrett’s
group use nicknames to
avoid identification by the
authorities